An "Intellect-Tickling" Day at the New Museum

Finally…a real post! And a museum post! Woohoo! Actually don’t get too excited, this is probably going to be one of the few museum visits for me, at least art museums. I’m confident enough in my general intelligence to admit that I’m not really intellectual enough for contemporary and modern art. Science museums though, I’m all over that. (There is a seriously cool exhibit coming up at the AMNH this month that you will SURELY hear about) But anyway, I still enjoy the ~25% of art museums that I understand. And I was really interested in checking out the New Museum after I got a Groupon email about it. I was initially drawn to the picture of the museum’s exterior--it’s a really great piece of art in itself: a stack of different sized boxes shifted around a central axis. It’s like a modern leaning tower of Pisa! Sort of. So I went on to read the description, which said the museum "showcases intellect-tickling contemporary art from adventurous artists," and I though...Alright, I'm down with some tickling of the intellect on a Sunday afternoon.

The museum is down in the Bowery and very easy to pick out on a street with few modern buildings. As I said, a lot of the pieces were over my head, but the ones I did understand, I was totally into. So I’m going to recap what was most memorable of what my feeble engineering mind could grasp.

The ground floor has a fun little exhibit called “Voice and Wind” and is referred to as a “meditative installation”, where the artist uses venetian blinds and scent atomizers that hang from the ceiling as “sensorial stimuli infusing the installation with subtle tactile and olfactory experiences that call upon the visitor’s subjectivity as a key element in the meaning of the work.” << Kinda heavy right? Well to me it was a fun colorful maze where you can walk up to the fan devices and guess the scents coming from each one, lots of earthy aromas. Ask the guard what they are when you’re done to see how you do! We got most of ‘em :) It was fun. Interactive is ALWAYS fun. I’m not so sure what I learned though…

The exhibit I was most excited for was “Free”, which is built upon the idea of free culture, “a social movement that acknowledges the revolution the internet has caused in industries like music and print publishing, and argues that it be dealt with as an opportunity for creating, sharing and distribution of knowledge, rather than a threat.” So the artists are all exploring how people and society have changed with the expansion of the public space and how they’ve adjusted to a world where information is so easily accessible. As I’ve been looking into digital media and marketing as a career path, I’ve been learning a lot about how growth in the digital space has really affected the way the whole world works. (I’m currently reading Googled, the story of google…and it really puts the massive disruptive effect of their creations into perspective. Very cool story if you’ve got the time, but warning: there is a lot of detail in there.) So since this has been at the forefront of my intellectual and professional curiosity recently, I was pumped.

I’ll talk about my favorite piece: 19:30. I really LOVED this display, by a Yugoslavian woman who wanted to show how (and this is in the simplest terms, must check it out for the full effect), prior to the expansion of the internet into the country--which happened to occur simultaneously with the collapse of socialism--the 8:30pm (or 19:30) news was considered a “unifying social norm,” since the whole country would sit down to view the broadcast. But as the country fell apart and internet access allowed people to get their news at any time, this unifying event disappeared. Then in the ‘90s, electronic dance music came into popularity and young people would gather in these huge groups to basically get down and rave. The message of the piece is that: when information can be accessed at any time, the nightly news loses its power to unite a large group, but a live event like a rave, can still bring large groups together. To show this, the artist has a projection of two parallel screens, the left showing news broadcasts and the right showing videos of Yugoslavians dancing and raving, with perfectly coordinated typical “news music” combined with techno-electronica music in the background. I recorded a short clip of the action to give you an idea (and introduce some video into the blog), but it really does not do the display justice. I came back twice to listen to techno and watch the globes rotating and news broadcasters at the same time as crazy raving with smoke and lasers. The music really fit perfectly and I thought the message was pretty cool. Access to the internet completely changed routine.

The main exhibit right now, which takes up 3 floors of the museum, is the “Last Newspaper” which explores the "ways artists approach the news and respond to the stories and images that command the headlines." This is a pretty broad concept so there were a lot of different types of pieces in the exhibit.

One of the more memorable pieces, “Eulogies to One and Another” compares the news coverage of two coworkers involved in a car bombing in Iraq. An American woman and Iraqi man who worked with a non-profit in Iraq, both died in the car bombing, but received very different levels of remembrance in the press. These two pictures show the same news articles, the first set of frames highlights all of the news surrounding the deaths, but the second set highlights only the statements about to the Iraqi man killed in the bombing. You can see that the frames are almost empty in this set. Pretty sad. I mean there is something to say about the fact that American and UK news sources would be more interested in the death of an American than an Iraqi, but the difference in degree of mention of the American and Iraqi in all of the news articles is pretty drastic. It was just kind of a “wow” moment. Click the pics to enlarge and get a better idea.  

Also there was a particularly disturbing display, of which you will not get the full effect if you don’t read the description. On first glance you see about 8 newspaper covers with pictures of Saddam Hussein with statements that chronicle his downfall, all covered with splatters of glitter. So I’m thinking ok…this is some sort of “I hate Sadaam” display…covering his face with paint, that happens to have glitter in it? As I was standing there eyeing the papers, searching deep inside my head for something really intellectual, my museum buddy goes “OH GROSS” and tells me I have to read the description. It’s jizz, people. Yea, semen. The artist has ejaculated onto the newspapers and then sprinkled them with glitter to show his "response to the hysterical headlines and comment on the brutally transient nature of celebrity." ...I don't know what to say...way to really stick it to Saddam, buddy...?

So if all of the intellectual art has drained you, once you're done you can kick up your blood-sugar levels with a delicious Birdbath by City Bakery chocolate chip cookie and a coffee! Everyone knows it’s tiring to walk around a museum all day, so a cookie and a coffee and a little bit of rest for your feet is a perfect end to a great day. That cookie was clutch. (Somehow even when the post/activity has nothing to do with food I manage to find a way to bring it in haha…)

There is SO much in this museum that I didn’t even begin to touch on. Check the “Pics from my Trips” on the sidebar to the right to see some more pictures from my visit. And I definitely recommend the New Museum if you want an intellectual afternoon complete with some eye-opening moments (and a cookie on top).


- The Wandering New Yorker